The forgotten achievements
of Toronto's twentieth-century avenue of enterprise

Essay by Alfred Holden

On October
17, 1994, Donald Weston drove from his North York home to the
industrial plant on Dupont Street in central Toronto where he
had been employed since 1952. He brought with him a borrowed video
camera and, just outside the main door, switched it on, briefly
photographing an iron plate identifying the premises as Hamilton
Gear, 950 Dupont. With the camera still rolling, he mounted a
couple of steps, opened the door and went in.

Room by room, Weston, aged sixty-two,
proceeded through the factory, letting the tape run. He walked
down a long, fluorescent-lit corridor of shelves loaded with the
tools, materials and equipment of twentieth-century machine-making.
He went through a workshop where men standing on a floor sprinkled
with metal shavings were attending whirring, spinning lathes cutting
teeth into gear blanks--disks of metal sliced, in another process,
from heavy rods of tempered steel or bronze.

Weston climbed down stairwells
with his camera on his shoulder, recording walls displaying framed
photographs of company products. He paused at one picture of a
gear about the size of a very large round of cheese. Its hefty
teeth are engaged with those of a "worm drive," a tube-shaped
gear resembling a giant piece of fusilli. The assembly has a satiny,
silvery sheen, and in the film is being inspected by a thoughtful-looking
man in glasses and overalls.

Weston made his way through the
company's administrative offices on the second floor along the
Dupont Street side of the plant. Telephones warble now and then,
voices can be heard and a lone secretary says "smile."
Weston moved along, recording jerky glimpses of floors and drop-ceilings
and hallway drinking fountains. He went into the company's vault
where, he later recalled, nothing more or less valuable than the
details of client orders from the last eighty-three years were
stored on reels of microfilm and in thick paper files.

Descending
into the bowels of the plant, past a Keep Door Closed sign, he
entered a dimly-lit furnace room where boilers and compressors
groaned and toiled, and where a hole in the floor contained a
pool of water, ten feet across and twenty feet deep -- "the
swimming pool, we called it" -- where at one time gears heated
red hot in an oven were hoisted for a sudden, sizzling quench
to harden their alloys.

By accident, the camera was aimed
toward large, south-facing factory windows that let in so much
light the image on the tape was momentarily whited-out before
the aperture adjusted to reveal more of the flotsam of a machine
shop: hoses, rods, wheels, pulleys, metal drums -- not all of
it in orderly storage. At many stops along the way, Weston, his
camera's red recording-light blinking, was greeted by co-workers.

"What's this about?"
asked a shipper. Following more light, Weston emerged into a vast
room, larger than a high school gymnasium, with a ceiling four
storeys high. Splashes of bright orange and blue -- the painted
surfaces of various walls and posts and pieces of machining equipment
-- seem to glow, since the big shop is flooded with daylight admitted
through walls sheathed entirely in panels of green-tinted glass.
Employees called this "the greenhouse." The boxy building's
skin of glass panes in industrial sash is hung on a structure
of steel girders whose thinness is deceptive, for dangling from
ceiling girders are huge trolleys and hooks used, Weston will
later note, for lifting industrial gears more than twenty feet
in diameter and weighing tons.

Machinists in another shop smiled,
but said little. "What've you heard?" someone asks.
"That we're going to close down?" When he was done,
Weston went back outside, stood on at the corner of Dupont Street
and Dovercourt Road and, with the camera's eye, recorded for posterity
the For Sale sign that hung high on a west-facing wall.

It had been up for months. No
buyer had been forthcoming. Six weeks after Donald Weston made
his video tour, Hamilton Gear and Machine Company, founded in
1911, ceased operations. Weston, a craftsman, was kept on to help
inventory the remains.

The following February the building's
contents were sold at auction by Corporate Assets, who published
an inventory of thousands of items. It read like an estate sale
for a factory and, more gloriously, a catalogue of the specialized
tools of the dying machine age. There were lathes and Sykes cutters
and drills, gear hobbs and grinding wheels, pullers and sharpeners,
brooms and office copiers and engineers' bookcases "with
contents." The firm's original Bertram boring mill was auctioned
off. Offered and sold, to a buyer from Saskatchewan, was a storehouse
of wooden mock-ups of gears. Crafted by staff pattern-makers from
top-grade pine, these were the historic library of shapes from
which sand moulds were made; moulds into which foundries poured
molten metal that when cooled became crude wheels and disks, raw
material for the deft hands and precision tools of Hamilton Gear
Company, 950 Dupont Street, to plane, cut and polish into the
wheels of industry.1

Enterprises, as great as Eastern
Airlines or as lowly as a corner store, will often die pathetically,
with no ceremony or celebration of their achievements. Dupont
Street in Toronto at the close of the twentieth century is an
open graveyard of such industries, most of which collapsed without
so much as a pauper's funeral. Their skeletons lie exposed. They
are the parking lots, warehouse loft condos and retail joints
of the post-industrial age: the soulless and struggling Galleria
Mall at Dufferin Street, on the site where Dominion Radiator Company
once made the pipes that warmed peoples homes; the more meritously
recycled McMurtry Furniture factory at Bartlett Avenue, which
churned out sturdy pressed-back chairs by the gross but where
developers lately spotted a new beauty (and perhaps dollar signs)
in rough brick walls and thick wood beams2;
the empty hulk of Mono Lino Typesetting, a victim of publishing's
shift from industrial plant to desktop; the Blockbuster Video
at 672 Dupont at Christie, where you may rent copies of Charlie
Chaplin's Modern Times in the very showroom where the Ford
Motor Company of Canada sold Model T automobiles that it built
upstairs and tested on a track on the roof.3

Indeed, the twentieth was
supposed to be Canada's century, and you'd be hard-pressed to
find another street in the Dominion where people worked as industriously
to make it so. At scales minute and massive, Dupont created: "Davenport
Works, Toronto, builds power, distribution, welding, furnace,
instrument, control and street-lighting transformers," declared
General Electric, describing in a 1930s-era booklet the sprawling
factories between what is now Dupont Street and Davenport Road,
along Lansdowne Avenue. In the illustrations, which include a
bird's-eye view reminiscent of nineteenth-century line drawings
which greatly exaggerated the size of factories, smokestacks and
even clouds of smoke, GE showed eight railroad tracks servicing
its smoke-belching complex of buildings and yards next to the
Canadian Pacific Railway's North Toronto line, paralleling Royce
Avenue, today's Dupont Street.

Electrical
transformers weighing up to 230 tons, whose cores and coils could
be hung like mere meat on hooks and jigs from the factory'sbeams,
were manufactured here. One publicity picture showed a "thirty-six
thousand kilovolt-ampere three-phase transformer" emerging
from the Davenport Works on CPR flatcar number 309926 which, due
to its cargo'sheight and weight, "had to be routed over more
than one thousand additional miles to reach its destination."4
Such freight may have had something to do with the PCBs whose
toxic presence later held up the site'sredevelopment -- one price
ultimately paid for the utility derived.

Not noted by GE was the Davenport
Works' previous lifetime as Canada Foundry Company, whose metal
products were poured, hammered and molded under earlier, more
Dickensian circumstances, but had more delicate, aesthetic applications.
Two fanciful dragons (or "grotesque animals" as the
inch-thick, cloth-bound Canada Foundry catalogue called them)
once guarded the grand stairway in old City Hall'slobby. Part
horse, part fish, and dressed in flowing vegetation, they were
designed by Toronto'sforemost architect of the Victorian age,
E.J. Lennox, and "executed in hammered iron," here.
Lost, then found by a city bureaucrat in an antique store, they
are now back near Dupont Street, at the Toronto Archives on Spadina
Road, presiding over the entrance to the reading room.

More
functionally luxurious were the elaborate bronze railings, made
here, that adorned the stairways and grand saloon of the Great
Lakes steamer Toronto of the Richelieu and Ontario Navigation
Company. Also made here were the entrance gates to Trinity and
Knox colleges, the rest of City Hall's railings and elevator cages,
wrought iron porches for Ontario'sParliament Buildings, and "design
number 1017," a park bench, "length five feet."5

Much later, Toronto's streets
would literally receive their names from Dupont, from another
plant where the street signs -- black letters on white -- that
today mark street names at city intersections were fabricated.
"They were made from galvanized steel in a hydraulic press
with closed dies, then were painted in an in-house paint line,"
said William Ferguson, who worked at Rosco Metal Products, 840
Dupont Street, at the time. "My role was to process the orders
in the sales department for the City of Toronto."6
The signs' installation, beginning in 1947, was a minor but marked
event in the city'shistory: "Street Signs 150 Years Old?
Cheer Up, New Ones Coming," said a headline in the Toronto
Star. "Nice sign," proclaimed Mayor Saunders.7

Proclaimed at dozens of intersections
by the new signs was Dupont'sown name, more pedigreed than the
street itself: the street was named for George Dupont Wells, "son
of Colonel the Honourable J. Wells of Davenport, county York,"
whose clout in nineteenth-century Toronto was such that George'sdaughter,
Nina, daughter-in-law Dartnell, and even his house, Davenport,
all had Toronto streets named after them.8
More humble than these folks, on George Dupont Wells' street,
in the twentieth century, was the flow of not only street signs,
but eavestroughing, downpipes and highway signage from Rosco'splant
-- products made at the intersection of Shaw Street where today
a big IGA supermarket provides pop, pasta and Air Miles.

Queues of men with lunch boxes
clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass
and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked
beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold
up the Euphrates and across the veldt," novelist Sinclair
Lewis wrote in the opening chapter of Babbitt, the 1922
novel that described the life and times and characters of Zenith,
an imaginary mid-sized U.S. city. "The whistles rolled out
in greeting, a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of
labour in a city built -- it seemed -- for giants."9

Yet
Americans held no monopoly on ambitious outlook and productive
ritual, as Louis Schmunk knew from his work in Europe and could
see every morning at Dupont Street and Lansdowne Avenue, where
he would arrive at 8 a.m. sharp to preside over the shift change
of his two thousand employees. He was manager of the Canadian
porcelain works of one of the world'searly great multi-national
companies, American Standard, manufacturer of bathroom fixtures.

Born in Russia in 1898, of German
parentage, Schmunk was raised in Ohio and earned a degree in ceramic
engineering from Ohio State University. His path to what became
Dupont Street crossed some momentous events: he was assigned to
set up plants in Europe during the 1930s, and did so in France,
Germany and Italy, until dictator Benito Mussolini began making
life difficult for Americans and British.

American Standard's Toronto plant
is a survivor from Dupont's zenith, thriving yet in 1998. Its
fiery heart, in 1917, in 1935 when Louis Schmunk arrived, and
today, has been its "tunnel kiln," which could never
be turned off. "The cars that the ware was loaded on ran
through the kiln continuously. Ware went in at one end unbaked
and came out at the other end fired," according to Margaret
Spence, Schmunk'sdaughter. "To check on the temperature of
these kilns there are peep holes every so often, and I remember
looking in. Everything was red hot."

The factory operated around the
clock. "Once in awhile you'd have what they'd call a kiln-wreck.
One of these wagons that went through the kiln would go off track,"
Spence remembers. "In the middle of the night my father would
go down to the plant, don an asbestos suit, and go into the kilns
to see what could be done to get it fixed and operational. You
could turn the heat down a bit, but certainly it could not be
turned off because everything in there would be ruined."10

Spence remembers watching
skilled men manipulating huge sieves, suspended from the ceiling
on chains, which were used to shake a glazing powder on cast iron
bathtubs that when baked would come out all glossy. The very fine
clay used for sinks and toilets came from as far away as China,
arriving by rail on freight cars that could be brought in on sidings.
Later insurance maps of Toronto refer to American Standard'skilns
as "gas-fired," but in the 1930s and '40s, Spence recalls,
they burned coal.

When he was nineteen, and working
in Switzerland, Benito Mussolini was given an opportunity to emmigrate
to America. Unable to decide, he is said to have tossed a coin.11
History might have been different had the coin landed on its other
face or, for that matter, if as he later cobbled together his
sawdust empire, he'd taken an overseas trip.

Let's say he did. Let's pick a
destination -- Toronto -- and a day of arrival, say Saturday,
July 3, 1937. That very week, Pan American and Imperial Airways
began trial flights across the Atlantic via Newfoundland.12

Mussolini would have found
a Toronto not unlike Lewis's imaginary Zenith, a strange mixture
of the shabby and sublime where "clean towers" stood
side by side with "grotesqueries," the "red brick
minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted
windows, wooden tenements coloured like mud."13

Riding
the Dupont streetcar as it crossed Bloor, Mussolini might have
been aghast at the thicket of overhead hydro wires -- abhorrent,
visible power such as had never existed in Europe'sgenteel capitals,
where the lines were buried. At Davenport and Dupont there were
only billboards and an Imperial Oil station (still there today)
for the Duce to contemplate.

The dictator's dismay would have
begun at Christie Street, where the Dupont car turned back and
he would have been left standing on a dusty TTC loop where the
big Loblaws supermarket now stands. His goal would have been to
trek west, to see a slice of Canadian and North American industrial
might, and from now on he'd walk. Mussolini would have brought
a street map, for until the late 1940s, when the city'sstreets
were widened and many jogs eliminated to facilitate auto traffic,
Dupont Street was not a single east-west corridor. Depending on
the decade, west of Christie Street it became Warren Avenue, Van
Horne Avenue, and finally Royce Avenue -- names all relegated,
by 1950, to the avenues of history.

As Mussolini walked west from
Christie Street he would have witnessed the growing, changing
character of North American industry. Before coming to the monster
factories -- American Standard, Dominion Radiator, G.E.'s Davenport
Works -- he'd have passed smaller enterprises, formidable for
their number and variety.

There would have been Roofer's
Supply Company -- later Rosco, of street sign fame -- with metal
cutting and shaping shops at Shaw Street. Mussolini might not
have noticed the yards of Kendle Coal, west of Christie Street,
or the strips of frame dwellings interspersed with the factories
along the street west from here. But he would have seen the smoke
-- not pollution in those days -- emanating from stacks at T.
Hepburn, an old and busy foundry near the corner of Ossington
Avenue. He would surely pick out Hamilton Gear's long plant wedged
between Van Horne Avenue and the CPR tracks.

He'd keep walking, past the big
plants and on along Royce Avenue, as Dupont Street here was then
called, to the subway -- not a train, but the railroad underpass
where Dupont Street today ends at Dundas Street West. Around here
Mussolini would have smelled, as one still could until the 1980s,
the fumes from Viceroy Manufacturing Company (makers of hard rubber,
including hockey pucks); paint from the Glidden plant south of
Royce; and glue from National Adhesives.

He would
have had to notice, converging at or within sight of here from
all directions, railroad lines. The Canadian Pacific North Toronto
line, paralleling what is now Dupont; their double-track Galt
subdivision and Toronto, Grey and Bruce line; Canadian National'sNewmarket
line and double-track Brampton subdivison.14
Had he paused he would have noticed that, like clockwork, freight
trains passed pulled by massive steam engines, bigger and more
powerful than any in Europe, bringing raw materials and taking
away finished products with a smooth efficiency that could not
but impress the man who, after all, made Italy'strains run on
time.

Benito Mussolini could have continued
walking and seen even more, but wouldn't have. The implications
of what he had seen would have been clear. Could a war be won
against nations backed by the might Dupont Street represented
at its zenith? Benito Mussolini would have reached for a TTC ticket
in his pocket. He would have dropped it into the fare box on the
next southbound Dundas West car. He would have gone home to reconsider
his imperial plans.

Mussolini was not yet conceived
when James Kendle, early in the 1880s, took the emmigration gamble
and left Newfoundland for Toronto. He put his carpentry skills
to work building houses on Palmerston and Manning avenues, where
on the latter street he and his young wife, Sybil, a former opera
singer from Pennsylvania, settled down at number 734. In the off-season
James Kendle hauled coal, which proved lucrative, if also competitive.
His grandson, James Kendle Jr., today estimates there were once
three hundred to four hundred coal dealers in Toronto, a good
chunk of them on the corridor that is now Dupont Street, which
is where the railways brought coal and where the Kendle business
grew.

The Kendle Coal Company would
have two yards, one west of Ossington Avenue and the other west
of Christie Street next to where the Ford plant became Planter's
Nut and Chocolate Company, which it remained for decades. As the
years went by, Kendle's edge in this saturated market was the
niche he carved out by selling home and business heating customers
a special, high-grade Pennsylvania coal.

Anthracite,
which was very hard and bluish in colour, burned hot and clean.
Such was its reputation that in the U.S. the Lackawanna Railroad,
which fueled its locomotives with the coal, worked up a memorable
billboard campaign around one Pheobe Snow -- not the singer, but
a young woman who rode trains always dressed in white. She extolled
the virtues of the Lackawanna, where clothes wouldn't get dirty
from soot. "Says Phoebe Snow: 'The miners know that to hard
coal my fame I owe, for my delight in wearing white is due alone
to anthracite.'"15

There exist early photographs
of a horse-drawn Kendle Coal Company wagon pausing on an Annex-area
street of freshly-built homes. A young man sits stoically at the
front, holding the reins in his left hand. The cargo box is loaded
with canvas bags full of coal. By the 1920s a photo of James Kendle
Sr., now a mature and successful businessman, shows him looking
cocky and confident. Holding a bicycle by his side and wearing
a cap and tie, he stands on what is now Dupont Street behind a
spanking new flatbed truck parked at the curb (a horse and wagon
are almost hidden). "J. Kendle and Company," says the
decal on the truck bed, which is presumably loaded with premium
product because there is a seal on the cab door, and the office
window behind: "Celebrated Lackawanna Anthracite Coal."

Growing
up around a coal yard had its perks. An unlikely one was the Santa
Claus Parade, whose route, Kendle Jr. recalls, at one time followed
Van Horne and Dupont streets into midtown before turning south
toward Eaton's. "They would back a coal truck up to the lot
line and we'd sit on the back of it and watch." As a youth
helping haul coal, he'd learn the disadvantages: Santa's November
march wreaked havoc with Saturday coal deliveries.

Originally shoveled and bagged
by hand, coal here was later handled with chutes and conveyors.
Today, Jim Kendle can still rhyme off the names of specialized
cuts of anthracite required by the coal era'sself-stoking furnaces.
"Egg coal, stove coal, nut coal, pea coal, rice coal,"
Kendle says. "Buckwheat coal." One winter day Kendle
scored points with a police officer on Davenport Road at the foot
of the Bathurst Street hill when he took "a box of ashes
from buckwheat coal and spread them over the street. The cars
went right up." The cinders are rough, "like bits of
popcorn." In wintertime, Kendle delivery trucks carried buckets
of buckwheat cinders to help motorists. Says Jim: "It was
good P.R."16

The rituals of heating with
coal -- "a ton of coal per year per room"17
-- are forgotten and unlamented. But they were not without their
poetic aspect. "To tell you the truth, Charlie kind of liked
to keep that old furnace roaring: Getting the flames started with
paper and kindling," George Gamester reported in the Toronto
Star when Charles Overton, a Davenport Road resident, still
fueled his furnace with coal supplied by Kendle from Dupont Street.
He liked "banking the fire morning and evening, cleaning
out the grates; wielding the poker and flue brush, feeling the
explosive 'whoof!' when he pitched in too much coal powder from
the bottom of the bin."18

Alas, coal had been in decline
since World War II. The Trans-Canada pipeline sealed its fate
and with the advent of gas and disappearance of soot Toronto took
another leap toward modernity. "End of company, end of an
era," Gamester wrote one day in the 1980s. "Next Monday,
Jim Kendle closes the gates forever at the J. Kendle Company on
Dupont Street, coal merchants for 105 years."19

The
future is always visible, but hard to decipher. Who'd have thought
when grocer Leon Weinstein bought a coal yard at Dupont and Huron
streets, somewhere around 1956, and erected a supermarket there
a year or so later, that it was actually watershed. But it was
-- a preview of Dupont's post-industrial future, visible to the
eye if not the conscious mind, even as the street's industrial
might yet grew.

Weinstein was the Dave Nichol
of his era -- an outgoing, cigar-smoking marketer who parlayed
a small grocery store at Coxwell and Danforth avenues into a chain
of thirty-eight supermarkets. "Power" was the name they
went under. It was lifted, the story goes, from a gasoline ad.20
The banner was a bit obscure but decisive and forward-looking;
the moniker looked good on the new Dupont store (the Loblaws at
Huron Street in 1998), showy and modernistic in a 1958-era photograph
with the store against a background of Casa Loma's medeival-looking
towers on the Davenport hill. In front, the supermarket's transparent
glass wall overlooks Dupont's archaic streetcar tracks.

There was now, prophetically,
a parking lot where coal had been piled, and a few blocks south
rose the dust from construction whose future implications Weinstein
must surely have understood. Along St. George Street, south of
Dupont to Bloor, decrepit mansions were giving way to a brave
new world of apartment blocks.

These buildings signaled a sea-change,
not only for architecture, of which they represented some of the
city'searliest, best and worst modernist examples, but the functioning
of Toronto'saging core, which, unlike U.S. cities, would receive
a perennial tide of immigrants and young middle-class as industry
moved out. For their needs they would require housing, Power,
and much else -- muffler shops, locksmiths, Birkenstock shoes
-- and Dupont Street, between its factories, would provide.

Such juxtaposition has always
been part of Dupont's cityscape. As long as they cut gears and
made hosiery, printing ink, paints, and rubber here, they have
also given women permanents and served 24-hour breakfast in greasy
spoons (Hamilton Gear crews ate at Central Lunch; today the Vesta
comes to mind: "All Day Steak and Eggs, $6.95"). Cars
have been made, sold, and wrecked on Dupont Street; at fierce-looking
banks at key intersections deposits have been received and capital
dispensed.

Few think
of Dupont as a neighbourhood. Its length and grunginess today
may disqualify it. Yet people have always lived here and, to a
surprising degree, identified with the street. Displaced by the
Hungarian uprisings of 1956, Susan Stiasny'sfamily arrived in
Toronto the next year, renting an upstairs apartment on Dupont
Street above what is, in 1998, the Red Raven, a pub.

To her five-year-old sensibilities
Dupont was the centre of the universe. In her overgrown backyard,
tight against the CPR tracks, she and her brothers cleared enough
brush to create a pile of cuttings so deep they could jump into
it from a second-storey window. Another picture of Weinstein'sPower
store shows, in the window, a coin-operated rocket ship for the
kids to ride, if they could cajole their Cold War-displaced mom
to give up the nickel.

From time to time, Power drew
the crowds with free rides, if not free lunch: "They had
a little fair [merry-go-rounds, ferris wheels, etc.]. As neighborhood
children, we made as full a use of these free rides as the harassed
attendants allowed."

The Stiasny kids' connection to
the outside world was the clanging, bumping streetcar (which would
be converted to electric trolley buses in 1963 and to diesels
in 1994, coinciding with a crash in Dupont's transit ridership).
"As an interesting variation on the game of 'chicken,' we
played 'stop the streetcar,'" Stiasny remembers. "When
the streetcar stopped for passengers we would all lie down on
the tracks in front of it. The one who ran first when the conductor
finally came out to personally kill us was the loser." Later
the youngsters found other uses for the Dupont car. "One
day, my father gave us money to go to a movie -- my first. My
brother, our friends and I rode the streetcar around onto Davenport
Road and into downtown. We saw The Blob, a Steve McQueen
classic, about a huge wad of gum that rolled along eating people.
Never having seen a movie, I was quite convinced of its reality."

Dupont Street, with its known
dangers, was a lot safer. "For me, I guess Dupont was a refuge
in which I had opportunity to freely experience, and from which
we made forays into the larger world."

For
a privileged few out in the larger world, Dupont itself was an
escape. There is a photograph in the Toronto Reference Library
of Clifford Sifton, Katherine Capreol, Sydney Pepler and Melville
Rogers performing a figure-skating maneuver on the indoor rink
of the Toronto Skating Club, an arena which was built on the north
side of Dupont Street near Manning Avenue in 1922.

Minus its ice, the club, somewhat
mysteriously, is still there, right down to its original wicker
furniture. In 1957, Imperial Optical magnate Sydney Hermant, an
avid tennis player, led a group which purchased the building and
converted it into an indoor tennis club. The front door is always
locked (members have keys), and membership is by invitation; it
includes, at this writing, former prime minister John Turner and
former MP and cabinet minister Barbara McDougall and one wonders
if the two, who once sat opposite each other in the House of Commons,
have ever faced off at tennis on Dupont Street. The handsome building'sunused
look is probably registered as an asset by club members, who presumably
value the privacy they can find on Dupont more than any pretension
which they cannot.

Dupont is a street transformed
from century's beginning, yet in fundamental ways the same. If
you walked it, as I did in 1998, from its junction with Dundas
Street in Toronto's west-end, to where it halts abruptly at Avenue
Road six kilometres east in midtown Toronto, you would see that
it has changed from a place where you earned money, to where you
spend it, but neither grown beautiful nor much uglier. You would
walk past a Lamborghini showroom, a Jaguar dealer and one of the
biggest, flashiest supermarkets in the country. You would walk
past crummy warehouse stores that sell everything from lawn ornaments
to used computers. There is a specialist in supplies for babies,
a billboard with a ten-foot image of Albert Einstein's face hawking
Apple computers, and a pop art-era subway entrance that looks
like a bubble stuck to the ground. There is little graffiti, little
litter; there are still overhead wires and blocks and blocks of
small semi-detached homes whose yards and porches, assaulted first
by heavy industry and later by heavy traffic, put a mean mask
on the surely varied existences within.

But keep
looking, keep peeling back the layers of wear and time, and Dupont
Street begins to change.

Let us return to Dovercourt Road
and Dupont to revisit, in 1998, the green glass house at what
was Hamilton Gear, which still stands.

There is a chance, quite good,
that the paper you are reading this on came from a mill whose
equipment still relies on Hamilton gears, cut in the green house
on Dupont Street.

It is a certainty that every ship
that has passed through the St. Lawrence Seaway -- and thus every
shipment -- has been accommodated by Hamilton gears from Dupont
Street, because they open and close the locks.

The nickel in your pocket may
owe a debt to Hamilton gears made for Inco or Falconbridge. Hamilton's
resource-generating, nation-building gear customers also included
Cominco, Placer Dome, and Noranda. Hamiltons were ordered from
Dupont Street for the great Polaris mine on Cornwallis Island
(seventy-six degrees north, ninety-seven degrees west), N.W.T.

Throughout the day, today, Canadian
National trains will cross lift bridges, such as that crossing
into Vancouver over Burrard Inlet, that are lowered and raised
by Hamilton gears, cut and machined on Dupont Street in Toronto.

Forty years ago, when the supersonic
Avro Arrow jet was launched, Hamilton gears, machined to perfection
on Dupont Street, opened and closed the pilot's canopy over the
cockpit.

Far
into the future, a great radio astronomy telescope in Green Bank,
West Virginia will still follow the stars on mechanisms driven
by Hamilton gears, made on Dupont Street.

At Front and John streets, Hamilton
gears transmit power to the wheels of the movable roof of Toronto's
domed stadium.21

When you know all this,
Dupont Street, so flat, long and gritty, rises to heights. It
is a place where visions and achievements far-reaching, even spectacular,
began. In ways unseen, unrecorded, Dupont Street in Toronto was
one of the places where the twentieth century, now at a close,
was made.

This essay was originally published in Taddle
Creek, a Toronto literary magazine, in December 1998. For
assistance on this project the author would like to thank Don
Weston, Margaret Spence, James Kendle, William Ferguson, Susan
Stiasny, and Donald Hood; also Alec Keefer of the Architectural
Conservancy of Ontario, Sally Gibson of the Toronto Archives,
Sandra Notarianni and Anthony Fredo of the Ford Motor Company
and George Gamester of the Toronto Star.